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In its inaugural Summer Studio Tour, Silver Lake architectural non-profit Materials & Applications certainly gave us a lot to chew on. As part of its fundraising efforts for future installations and also as a way of building a creative community, M&A set a weekend of tours that offer design professionals a tantalizing peek into the studios and processes of other creative firms around town. Last Saturday, M&A took visitors to the Eastside creative scene, but Sunday was the Westside’s turn to shine with six studio visits in the line-up. Here’s what I saw.

On Saturday I had the good luck to wander around the East side of L.A. on the Materials and Applications Studio Tour. Though it's always nice to see how creative types work, what was most fascinating about this tour was that each of the firms on it doesn't practice architecture in any typical way. They're just as interested in art installations as they are in slick residences. In some cases, they could scotch residences all together and only do scrappy, urbanistic work. What's more, each firm—from the design-build work of architeture outfits Oyler Wu Collaborative and Urban Operations, to the public art work of Ball Nogues Studio and Didier Hess, to the biomorphic tech work of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S—views architecture as the point of departure for their work, not necessarily the endpoint. It was a great tour and just one of the many events taking place out here as part of the L.A. Design Festival. With Dwell on Design still to come, there's plenty of great design events right now in Los Angeles.

In January 2008, Emily Pilloton founded Project H Design in an effort to "turn criticism into action" by connecting socially minded designers with the communities in need of their creations. The designer and former Inhabitat managing editor published Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People in September 2009 and is now hitting the road in a renovated Airstream outfitted with a traveling exhibition of products featured in the book.

A modern exterior opens its lemon-yellow doors wide to reveal several generations of furnishings, rich technicolor accents, and quirky contributions from the artist and architect who live within. A sneak peek of Tom Marble and Pae White's Los Angeles house, Casa Cuadrada, one of the destinations on Dwell on Design's East Side home tour.

As a young city built on the ruins of a Spanish mission, Los Angeles has never had much of an architectural "cathedral culture." But L.A. has always been a magnet for religious free-thinkers and adventurous architects, and both star in "City of the Seekers: L.A.'s Unique Spiritual Legacy," a self-guided tour offered by the Los Angeles Conservancy, on one day only, Saturday March 14.